Muslim Spain gave rise to two unusual figures in the mystical tradition of Islam: Ibn Masarra (269/883-319/931) and Ibn al-ʿArabī (560/1165-638/1240). Representing, respectively, the beginning and the pinnacle of Islamic mysticism in al-Andalus, Ibn Masarra and Ibn al-ʿArabī embody in their writings a type of mystical discourse which is quite different from the Sufi discourse that evolved in the Islamic east during the 9th-12th centuries. In Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus, Michael Ebstein points to the Ismāʿīlī tradition as one possible source which helped shape the distinct intellectual world from which both Ibn Masarra and Ibn al-ʿArabī derived. By analyzing their writings and the works of various Ismāʿīlī authors, Michael Ebstein unearths the many links that connect the thought of Ibn Masarra and Ibn al-ʿArabī to the Ismāʿīlī tradition.

First published in 1927, An Anthology of Mysticism and Mystical Philosophy is a valuable contribution to the literature of mysticism in general, both in its theoretical and experimental aspects. It contains over seven hundred and fifty quotations from one hundred and fifty-eight ancient and modern mystical, philosophical, and scientific works. This book also acts as a supplement to William Kingsland’s previous volume Rational Mysticism for it is illustrative of the principles therein set forth.

The volume investigates the question of meaning of mystical phenomena and, conversely, queries the concept of "meaning" itself, via insights afforded by mystical experiences. The collection brings together researchers from such disparate fields as philosophy, psychology, history of religion, cognitive poetics, and semiotics, in an effort to ascertain the question of mysticism's meaning through pertinent, up-to-date multidisciplinarity. The discussion commences with Editor's Introduction that probes persistent questions of complexity as well as perplexity of mysticism and the reasons why problematizing mysticism leads to even greater enigmas. One thread within the volume provides the contextual framework for continuing fascination of mysticism that includes a consideration of several historical traditions as well as personal accounts of mystical experiences: Two contributions showcase ancient Egyptian and ancient Israelite involvements with mystical alterations of consciousness and Christianity's origins being steeped in mystical praxis; and four essays highlight mysticism's formative presence in Chinese traditions and Tibetan Buddhism as well as medieval Judaism and Kabbalah mysticism. A second, more overarching strand within the volume is concerned with multidisciplinary investigations of the phenomenon of mysticism, including philosophical, psychological, cognitive, and semiotic analyses. To this effect, the volume explores the question of philosophy's relation to mysticism and vice versa, together with a Wittgensteinian nexus between mysticism, facticity, and truth; language mysticism and "supernormal meaning" engendered by certain mystical states; cognitive-poetic analysis of mystical poetry; and a semiotic scrutiny of some mystical experiences and their ineffability. Finally, the volume includes an assessment of the so-called New Age authors' contention of the convergence of scientific and mystical claims about reality. The above two tracks are appended with personal, contemporary accounts of mystical experiences, in the Prologue; and a futuristic envisioning, as a fictitious chronicle from the time-to-come, of life without things mystical, in the Postscript. The volume contains fourteen chapters; its international contributors are based in Canada, Israel, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Revealing, in an original and provocative study, the mystical contents of the works of famous atheists Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, Donna Lazenby shows how these thinkers' refusal to construe worldviews on available reductive models brought them to offer radically alternative pictures of life which maintain its mysteriousness, and promote a mystical way of knowing. A Mystical Philosophy contributes to the contemporary resurgence of interest in Spirituality, but from an entirely new direction. This book provides a warning against reductive scientific and philosophical models that impoverish our understanding of ourselves and the world, and a powerful endorsement of ways of knowing that give art, and a restored concept of contemplation, their consummative place.

African American Philosophy and African American Philosophers have played a central role in understanding and also shaping what it means to be black in America. Some of their conclusions were reactions to the mistreatment they received from the majority population, but other of their conclusions were extensions and/or novel positions taken with a view through past perceptual lenses. Yet, with the mass exodus of black students from HBCU’s after the civil rights era, many of the important figures and their inquiries have been little or poorly studied. The significance of this work is found in its attempt to grapple with one such seminal figure, his memory of his ancestors, and the education he received from Morehouse College (in the Atlanta University Center), all of which formed the roots of the ideas he later produced. Howard Thurman, former Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, and mentor to figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., left quite a large ideological footprint; however, just as others of his milieu, his ideas have been largely overlooked. Thurman’s deep-rooted knowledge of black culture, particularly black religious ideas as they existed during the period of African enslavement in the United States and as they were exhibited in the Negro Spirituals, shaped his thinking and allowed him to produce a body of work grounded in the musings and traditions of his ancestors. This volume investigates, forms an analysis, and even critiques Thurman’s work such that others can benefit from the profundity of his thoughts while also taking note of their relevance for today’s philosophers concerned with humanity.

This book explores dialogue as a transformative form of philosophical practice by unveiling the method behind the unique dialogue developed by mystic and thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986). While Krishnamurti himself generally rejected the cultivation of systems and techniques, Shai Tubali argues that there are easily identifiable patterns through which Krishnamurti strove to realize his dialogical aims. For this reason, he refers to this method, whose existence has evaded Krishnamurti’s followers and scholars alike, as the Krishnamurti dialogue. He suggests that these discursive patterns serve to broaden our understanding of the possibilities of philosophical and religious dialogues and further illuminate established forms of dynamic discourse, such as the Socratic method. Inspired by Pierre Hadot’s revolutionary reading of the classical Greco-Roman texts, the author centers his attention on Plato’s Socratic dialogues and the guru–disciple conversations in the Hindu Upanishads, which fall within the scope of what may be termed ‘the transformative dialogue’: dialogues that have been written with the intention of bringing about a transformation in the mind of the interlocutor and reader and reorienting their way of life. This text appeals to students as well as researchers and suggests that the Krishnamurti dialogue is not only a continuation and development of the transformative dialogue, but that it also amalgamates ingredients of classical Western philosophy and South Asian mysticism. Moreover, this type of dialogue encourages readers to revisit the lost practice of transformative philosophy, in that it reveals new pathways of philosophical and religious inquiry that bear thought-provoking practical implications.

The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

Philosophy of religion is focused chiefly on theism. Yet there are a growing number of new and alternative religious movements that would also benefit from philosophical scrutiny. This book is the first collection of philosophical essays, by a team of international authors, focusing on new and alternative religious movements. The book begins with an examination of the definition of new religious movements, before offering an introduction to, and an analysis of, core beliefs held by particular movements, including: Scientology, Raelianism, Siddha Yoga, the Arica School, the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormonism), Pantheism, Digital Theology, New Atheism, and the Word of Faith movement. Contributors offer an analysis of one or more of the core tenets of the religious movement, providing readers with both an insight into the group, and the methodology of philosophy of religion.

This book is a collection of specifically commissioned articles on the key continental European philosophical movements since 1914. It shows how each of these bodies of thought has been shaped by their responses to the horrors set in train by World War I, and considers whether we are yet ‘post-post-war’. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914,set in chain a series of crises and re-configurations, which have continued to shape the world for a century: industrialized slaughter, the end of colonialism and European empires, the rise of the USA, economic crises, fascism, Soviet Marxism, the gulags and the Shoah. Nearly all of the major movements in European thinking (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Hegelianism, Marxism, political theology, critical theory and neoliberalism) were forged in, or shaped by, attempts to come to terms with the global trauma of the World Wars. This is the first book to describe the development of these movements after World War I, and as such promises to be of interest to philosophers and historians of philosophy around the world.